When Facts Don't Matter

Mark Danner has an essay in the upcoming New York Review of Books, (available widely online already, as such things seem to be these days) about "How Bush Really Won":        

"Despite all the talk about 'moral values,'" says Danner, "the 2004 election turned on a fulcrum of fear." The Bush campaign was "disciplined, organized, relentless." Its vision was "clear and absolutely simple to understand." That it was not based on fact was of no importance, because "the facts did not matter -- not necessarily because [Bush supporters] were ignorant of them, though some certainly were, but because the President was offering in their place a worldview that was whole, complete, comprehensible, and thus impermeable to statements of fact that clearly contradicted it. [Bush supporters] faced a stark choice: either discard the facts, or give up the clear and comforting worldview that they contradicted. They chose to disregard the facts."

What happens to nations in which the facts no longer matter? What happens when giving people the facts, when telling the truth, makes no difference? What should truth-tellers do when the truth sets no one free?


I've been reading about optimists and pessimists lately. Optimists and pessimists have different ways of explaining events. Optimists see good things as permanent and pervasive, and tend to give themselves credit for them. They see bad things as temporary, limited in scope, and not their fault. Pessimists see things the opposite way. They blame themselves for bad events and credit luck for good ones; they believe the bad is more permanent than the good; and they think bad things are more pervasive than good things.

Optimists live longer and are happier people. Pessimists are depressed and anxious. But studies have also shown that pessimists have a much better grasp on reality than optimists do. Sure, sometimes they go overboard: blaming themselves for things for which they are not responsible, forgetting that most things, both good and bad, are temporary, and sometimes failing to keep bad things in perspective. But overall, pessimists are in greater touch with the facts.

Depressives are depressed in part because they are pessimists. We share this with the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, who rarely had anything good to say about the world they lived in. The research shows that we would be happier and healthier if we were not quite so aware of the facts, if we could discard the facts for a "clear and comforting worldview." And yet doing so is, for me, a rare temptation. The truth-telling that comes from depressive realism allows me to wrest some meaning from my illness, and it has become part of my identity. But if I did not so insistently, so feelingly see the facts, I would likely not be so depressed.


Why do I talk about my depression so much here? Because I think it has everything to do with politics today. The facts are frightening; the facts are horrifying; the facts are bad for your health.

The Bushists won because the facts, for many people, are too difficult to bear. And it is not just Bush supporters who are ignoring the facts now. Since November, I have seen an increasing number of Democrats retreat into the safety of illusions. They believe that the right to an abortion is not really in danger. They are sure that a backlash against Bush is coming, and that the moderates in the Republican party will revolt and save us from further destruction. They are hopeful that Bush is leaning toward a more inclusive foreign policy, that the next four years will be better than the last. Before the election, they believed that if Bush won, things would get very bad indeed. Now that he has, they have retreated. Things will be okay, they say. It's just another four years. They wouldn't really do that. The people won't let them. They don't have the mandate. Things will only get really bad if we have a financial crisis, or another major attack. And that probably won't happen. It's not so bad now.

This is unwarranted optimism, my friends. Today, right now, our nation tortures as a matter of policy. Today, people making the minimum wage cannot afford to live. Today the gap between rich and poor is growing, and the environmental regulations are weakening, and our soldiers are dying. Some 48% of those who voted did so for Kerry, but most of them also live in a world where most of the facts do not matter. Most of these people are not mobilized to fight creeping fascism; they have turned their eyes away from it.

If we are to overcome the Bushites, we must make reality more bearable for these people. If they cannot see it, they will not mobilize to change it. I don't know how to do this, since I can sometimes hardly bear reality myself. But I feel there are answers here somewhere -- some hopeful alternative to blind optimism, some spoonful of sugar that can make the medicine of reality go down, so that we may change it, and not, to steal Mr. Bush's words, "drift toward tragedy."

Nation of Scrooges

From NYT: Study Finds Gap in Wages and Housing Costs: "In only four of the nation's 3,066 counties can someone who works full-time and earns the federal minimum wage afford to pay rent and utilities on a one-bedroom apartment, an advocacy group on low-income housing has reported."

Just think about this. I mean, really think about it. Think about what it means that in most of the country working full-time at minimum wage will not allow you to pay for just one of the bare necessities of living: housing. Wondering what that must be like? How do people get by? A few years ago, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to find out.

Now, President Bush can talk all he wants about the wonders of private, faith-based charity. I'm all for charity. But people who work full-time should not have to need it. And don't tell me what's wrong with welfare, I'm not talking about welfare either.

I'm talking about wages. If people who work the minimum wage cannot survive on that, who should we blame for it? Who is paying that minimum wage?

We are. Our businesses are. The ones in which we, or our pension funds, hold shares. And why do we pay that minimum wage? Because we're allowed to, and since we're allowed, that means others will do it, and if others do it, we have to too, to be competitive. That's how the market works. The market will never work any different. The market is good for a lot of things, but it's not good for our souls, because it means that right now lots and lots of people are "not getting by in America."

And that is a fucking travesty.

There are many things that government can't fix. There is a place for private charity, and there is a place for the market. But when neither charity nor the market can fix a problem, and it's a problem that the government can fix, we must demand of our government that it fix the problem. The government can raise the minimum wage. No other force can do so. If we do not demand this of our government, and we have not, then we must, on this Christmas morning, admit that we are a nation of Scrooges.

Whatever you do, don't blow that whistle!

From NYT: Judge Limits Protections Allowed to Federal Whistle-Blowers:

Some federal doctors and medical researchers do not enjoy the same protections to blow the whistle on wrongdoing as other government employees, an administrative law judge has ruled.

The Nov. 9 decision, by Judge Raphael Ben-Ami of the United States Merit Systems Protection Board, held that Dr. Jonathan Fishbein, a specialist for the National Institutes of Health, could not invoke the Whistleblower Protection Act to keep from being fired.

Dr. Fishbein was hired by the institutes in 2003 to help improve AIDS research practices.

He told the protection board that he was being fired because he had raised concerns about sloppy practices that might endanger patient safety. The institutes said that he was being fired for poor performance and that he had failed to complete his two-year probationary period successfully.

The whistle-blower law was enacted more than a decade ago to strengthen federal workers' protections when they make accusations of government wrongdoing. It gives them outlets like the board to seek legal protection.

But Judge Ben-Ami ruled that Dr. Fishbein was not covered by the law, because he was a so-called Title 42 employee and therefore enjoyed "no appeal rights" during his probationary period.

Dr. Fishbein was hired under Title 42 of the federal code, which allows the government to pay research and medical experts as special consultants, giving them salaries higher than the civil servant maximums. The law is intended to help the government compete against high-paying private industries. Dr. Fishbein was paid $178,000 a year, slightly more than the $175,700 that members of President Bush's cabinet receive.

Dr. Fishbein was among several employees of the national institutes who had raised concerns about a study in Africa involving the AIDS drug nevirapine.

Documents showed that the way the research was conducted violated federal patient safety rules and suffered from record-keeping and patient monitoring problems. But the study's general conclusion that the drug could be used safely in single doses to protect babies from H.I.V. was approved.

"The Appalling Truth" about Torture

From WaPo:

The Bush administration refused to release these records to the human rights groups under the Freedom of Information Act until it was ordered to do so by a judge. Now it has responded to their publication with bland promises by spokesmen that any wrongdoing will be investigated. The record of the past few months suggests that the administration will neither hold any senior official accountable nor change the policies that have produced this shameful record. Congress, too, has abdicated its responsibility under its Republican leadership: It has been nearly four months since the last hearing on prisoner abuse. Perhaps intervention by the courts will eventually stem the violations of human rights that appear to be ongoing in Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan. For now the appalling truth is that there has been no remedy for the documented torture and killing of foreign prisoners by this American government.

Biscuit's working on learning optimism, so here's some good news for a change.

From December 22 NYT, "Big Cities Will Get More Antiterrorism Grants": "Responding to repeated calls from big-city mayors, the Department of Homeland Security is shifting a larger share of its annual $3.5 billion in antiterrorism grants to the nation's largest cities, allowing them to accelerate purchases of equipment and training needed to better defend against - or at least rapidly respond to - an attack."

About fucking time.

Can I have some torture with my turkey?

William Pfaff in the IHT, via Common Dreams:"Destroying cities and torturing prisoners are things you do when you are losing the real war, the war your enemies are fighting. They are signals of moral bankruptcy. They destroy the confidence and respect of your friends, and reinforce the credibility of the enemy."

Pfaff also notes: "The United States has never before officially practiced torture. It was not deemed necessary in order to defeat Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. Its indirect costs are enormous: in their effect on the national reputation, their alienation of international opinion, and their corruption of the morale and morality of the American military and intelligence services."

And then:

"It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Bush administration is not torturing prisoners because it is useful but because of its symbolism. It originally was intended to be a form of what later, in the attack on Iraq, came to be called "shock and awe." It was meant as intimidation. We will do these terrible things to demonstrate that nothing will stop us from conquering our enemies. We are indifferent to world opinion. We will stop at nothing."

Here's a question to ponder, though: Which enemies are the Administration trying to scare? The enemies of the state? Or those of the Republican party? Or have the state and the party merged in the person of George W. Bush, Our Leader, so that there is no criticizing one without being the enemy of the other?

Darn that ticking bomb!

Someone named John Quiggin I'd never heard of before I ended up on his blog (and of course I've forgotten again how I reached it, so I can't credit the other blogger who got me there. That's because I suck. I am a link-plagiarizer) has an excellent response to the ticking bomb problem It's very short, so go read the whole thing. His conclusion: "Since, to my knowledge, no torturer has ever made an immediate and voluntary confession, the practical impact is that the ticking bomb scenario should be disregarded in any consideration of the legal and political response to torture." That is just exactly what I was thinking! Only now I don't have to write it down.

For the depressed Democrat who has everything

From Alternet: For the depressed Democrat who has everything, the "Audi-Oh," a small, sound-activated vibrator:

Mid-November is when a lot of disappointed women, whose morale hit rock bottom on Nov. 3, were climbing out of their depression. Maybe they heard of this device and got the same idea I did. You could start taking anti-depressants. You could avoid the news entirely, but that would leave you dangerously uninformed about what this administration and its blind followers are up to. Or you could get an Audi-Oh and keep yourself current without every story feeling like a kidney punch.

I haven't filtered any information through the Audi-Oh just yet. It's still a little weird to me. But who wouldn't rather hear it all through a delightful hum? Imagine being able to watch "Hardfire" or "Crossballs," or whatever those gabfests are called and actually wanting to raise the volume instead of mute it. News hasn't been sexy since Clinton skipped out on D.C. This might change that.

After election day the London Daily Mirror ran a headline asking "How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?" Well, the answer is that being dumb is easy. Being informed is tough, especially if you've had bad news for the past four years and are hollow-eyed at the prospect of four more. You can't change the facts at your finger tips unless you have them, and if getting them can be less distressing, I'm all for it. What do you think, girls? Hands on buzzers.

Pentagon briefing

From TPM:

Gen. Richard Myers at today's Pentagon briefing: "This attack [in Mosul], of course, is the responsibility of insurgents, the same insurgents who attacked on 9/11, the same type of insurgents who attacked in Beirut, the same insurgents who -- type of insurgents who attacked the Cole, Khobar Towers, and the list goes on."

Fun facts about filibusters for all your holiday conversational needs

From Arianna Huffington, "How the GOP plans to nuke the constitution":

[T]he plan to do away with judicial filibusters is...an out-and-out power grab by the president and his Congressional accomplices. An underhanded scheme to kneecap the Constitution and take away the only weapon vanquished Democrats are left with to defend against Bush's "ten-gallon-hat" juggernaut. It would be impossible to overstate the importance of this battle. It is nothing less than a fight for the soul of our democracy – for what kind of country we want to live in.

[...]

Senate rules regarding filibusters are not something most Americans will find themselves discussing over a glass of eggnog during the holidays. But the impact these rules can have on our lives is staggering. And it must be made clear right now – not when Chief Justice Rehnquist resigns and Cheney and Frist team up to push the nuclear button. By then it will be much too late, and all Harry Reid will be able to do is duck and cover. True leadership is being able to see not just the crisis staring you in the face – but the one lurking just around the corner.

President Bush is pulling on his oversized Stetson and gearing up for battle. And here, unlike Iraq, he's making sure his political troops have all the armor they need. The Democrats need to pre-emptively launch an all-out campaign to educate the American people about what will be at stake during the coming assault on our democratic values. If they succeed, they will have the public with them, even if it becomes necessary to resort to threats of Mutually Assured Legislative Destruction. Let's hope that's not what it will take to protect the Senate, the Constitution, and over 65 years of hard-won social victories from the GOP's looming nuclear winter.

Miscellaneous (Depressing) Holiday Reading

(for those who are avoiding their relatives with the vague 'work to do on my computer' excuse...)

1) On Common Dreams, Marjorie Heins has a nice summary of the Bushist rediscovery of the practice of stalinist science. Any day now, our children will be taught that President Bush invented the Internets. Or maybe that god did. Or that god told President Bush to do it. Or, that President Bush felt in his gut that god was telling him to do it.

2) About those judges: From NYT:

President Bush plans to renominate 20 candidates for federal judgeships who have been unable to win confirmation in the Senate, the White House said today, in a signal that the president is ready for a showdown early next year.

"An effective and efficient judicial system is vital to ensuring justice for all Americans," the White House said. "The president nominated highly qualified individuals to the federal courts during his first term, but the Senate failed to vote on many nominations."

On a side note, when exactly did "the White House" become capable of speech?

3) You go to war with the army you have. From the LATimes:

Members of a second National Guard unit that prepared for duty in Iraq at the Army's Ft. Bliss compound have come forward with allegations that they were not adequately trained.

The soldiers said in interviews, e-mails and official documents that they were sent to war this year with chronic illness, broken guns and trucks with blown transmissions.

The unit's M-60 machine guns reportedly were in such bad condition when the soldiers deployed in February that one sergeant — in a section of a post-training summary sent to his commanders that was titled "gun maintenance" — wrote: "Perhaps we should throw stones?"

4) A civilian contractor with the Army Corps of Engineers responsible for securing Iraq's explosives, on Saddam's well-organized munitions dumps: "Those Iraqi army officers were the only ones who knew where they'd hidden all this stuff. It's like trying to figure out where the squirrels hid the nuts," he said. "The whole thing was dysfunctional."

5) John DiIulio comes out of hiding, and was last seen "attacking liberals for their political cowardice", as Brad deLong puts it.

Who needs Michael Crichton when we've got Avian Flu Epidemics?

From Wednesday's NYT:

Tests performed in Japan have identified that country's first human case of avian influenza and four other cases that are almost certainly the same ailment, a World Health Organization official said yesterday.
The organization, a United Nations agency, has said it is deeply concerned about the possibility of the virus, A(H5N1) , mutating into a lethal new virus and causing an epidemic that, at worst, could rapidly sweep the world.

Speaking of Michael Crichton, George Will had a really ludicrous op-ed about his latest book in WAPO a few days back. Will appeared to be using Mr. Crichton's novel as evidence that global warming is a complete myth. I wonder if he is aware that novels are, um, fictional, and that Michael Crichton, though bright, is not a climatologist (or a paleontologist, or a virologist, or a primatologist). Will points out that Crichton has "lots of real scientific graphs, and footnotes citing journals such as Progress in Physical Geography and Transactions -- American Geophysical Union." Well then, whatever he says must be true, right? Cause footnotes and graphs couldn't be used as a literary device in the service of verisimilitude, right?

Even more hilariously, Will goes on to write that "Crichton's subject is also how conventional wisdom is manufactured in a credulous and media-drenched society. Various factions have interests -- monetary, political, even emotional -- in cultivating fears. The fears invariably seem to require more government subservience to environmentalists and more government supervision of our lives." Of course. That's exactly what is happening in government today. Environmentalists are terrifying us with stories of global warming, all for financial, emotional, and political gain. Which, of course, they are reaping, in spades.

Finally, my goodness, Will compares the book to one by Ayn Rand, and it's meant to be a compliment. Poor Michael Crichton. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

What Would Kafka Say? The Collected Posts

I was going to start a regular feature "What Would Kafka Do?", but it's more like "What Would Kafka Say?", so that's what I've called it instead.

Collected Posts

#1: "Let the bad remain bad..."
#2: "Can you know anything other than deception?..."

What Would Kafka Say? #1

"Let the bad remain bad, otherwise it will grow worse."

Written on a slip of paper while in a sanatorium dying of tuberculosis of the larynx. Undated, but sometime in 1924, the year of his death.

Culture War

Reihan Salam, guest-blogging, along with two compatriots (and with incredible unpopularity, I might add) for Andrew Sullivan, has an interesting post about the culture war. Be forewarned, he's not the clearest blogger on the block. Kevin Drum admitted that he couldn't understand about "half of what [Salam] writes", to which Salam replied: "I spent the first several years of my life speaking an impenetrable patois of Bengali and Brooklynese; my desperate pleas for food or water were answered only by puzzled expressions and, in time, utter indifference. That I survived is a minor miracle. That I remain incomprehensible is a minor tragedy." I despised all three of Andrew's guest bloggers (not, of course, as people, merely as poor substitutes for the frequently infuriating man himself) until I read that post. The rarely-glimpsed husband half of Biscuit does hysterical accents, and I plan to start him working on a Bengali-Brooklyn accent immediately.

Anyway, Salam shoves way too much into this post about the culture war, and at 8:30 in the morning, only halfway through my coffee (and how did it become 8:30 anyway, we woke up with toddler-clock at 7:15 -- what have I been doing for the last hour?), I can't unpack it all. But there seem to be some interesting thoughts there. It is just disingenuous for Republicans to bitch and moan all the time about how Hollywood is so corrupting. Hollywood is extremely big business and its products are consumed in huge quantities by Americans themselves in addition to being exported for the world to consume. Those secular Jews in Hollywood who hate Christianity and like anal sex often do give a lot of money to Democrats, but their products conform to the same standard that all successful and mostly unregulated products do: they make what sells.

Anyway, I'll add 'thinking about this stuff more" to my list of future topics to post on. First I have to read the Tom Frank book everyone's talking about. I am too cheap to buy it, so I'm on the library waitlist for it.

Yet another fun-filled post on torture...

Via Andrew Sullivan, Publius on the Case for Conservative Outrage about Torture.:

If you are religious, and you support this administration, I think you need to ask yourself some tough questions about whether what we’re seeing is consistent with your religious views. If anything, I would expect activist Christians to follow the path of their ancestors when they were the moral vanguard in the fight against slavery and for civil rights. I would expect them to be louder than anyone.

But no one seems to care. We’re torturing and murdering prisoners and no one seems to care. It is becoming more and more clear that this torture was directed from on high, and no one seems to care. It’s time to get madder about this, especially if you’re a conservative. The torture undermines the war, threatens your foreign policy visions, jeopardizes our soldiers, exposes them to danger and death, undermines the rule of law, and violates the core tenets of your religion.

It’s time [to] stand up for your values or shut up about ours.

The Antidepressants Controversy: A Depressive's Perspective

First, Department of Duh: I can't imagine that anyone who has had any firsthand experience with antidepressant medication was the least bit surprised by these so-called 'new' warnings. When the "antidepressants may cause kids to kill themselves" story first came out, back in mid-October, I wrote the following letter to the NYTimes about it. Like all my many letters to the Times, it was not published:

Antidepressants can save lives. They have saved mine, several times.

However, it should not need stating by the FDA that whenever anybody, adult or child, is put on a drug to treat depression, they should be closely monitored and receive compassionate, knowledgeable care from a mental health specialist until they recover. GPs and pediatricians should not be prescribing such drugs and sending people along on their merry way.

There are no antidepressants on the market today (and perhaps none are possible) that take less than several weeks to have an antidepressant effect Anyone who has ever been through it could tell you that those weeks of waiting and wondering if the drug will work, if any drug will work, or if you are just to be left to rot inside you own personal mental hell, are excruciating. It doesn't matter how much doctors explain that it takes a few weeks, a depressed person responds by feeling immediately hopeful (wow, there is something actually wrong with me; there are drugs that can help) and then, when everything isn't instantly okay, more hopeless than before. When each minute is torture to live through, several weeks is too long, and the thought that the drugs might not work at all makes suicide a tempting option.

Whether there might be some actual biological effect of the drugs that causes increased risk of suicide, I cannot say. But it is in the very nature of the illness that the period of initial treatment is dangerous. The furor over the drugs themselves is a distraction from the fact that people are still not getting the mental health care that they need.

Last time I started taking the antidepressant Zoloft, to treat my depression, my psychiatrist checked in with me daily by phone, and I saw her in her office several times a week until I recovered. Her constant support and contact were critical to my getting through that dangerous time safely. Not everyone is lucky enough to get this kind of care, but everyone should.

If the FDA warning results in more careful care for those suffering from depression, it will save lives. However, such care is expensive and badly reimbursed by insurers, who continue to discriminate against mental illness. I suspect the warning will therefore simply prevent people from getting the help they need. They will get neither counseling nor medication, and some of them will kill themselves. It will be small comfort to their families that they won't have a drug to blame.

Now, two months later, here's Medscape, reporting on one of the studies that prompted the warning:

For each of the drugs, both in children and adults of all ages, suicidal behavior was more common within a few days to a month of starting the antidepressant than later on. The authors thought the most likely explanation of this finding is that antidepressant treatment is not immediately effective and that the medication may be prescribed just when the patient's symptoms and suicide risk are greatest.

And later in the article:

One problem related to the prescription of newer antidepressants is inadequate monitoring of patients by physicians. It is possible that partial or early response to medication might result in some patients' energy levels increasing before their suicidal ideation clears, leaving them able to think about or enact a suicide plan, whereas before they were too incapacitated to do much of anything. Undiagnosed bipolar illness may also be a culprit. Prescribing antidepressants for bipolar patients, if they are not concurrently taking mood stabilizers (eg, lithium, valproate), can induce mania or cycle acceleration and otherwise increase symptoms.[6,7]

And:

[A]ntidepressants are not trivial medicines and their use has to be carefully monitored by the prescriber and other clinicians. The National Committee for Quality Assurance has focused on this issue for several years, but only for patients older than 18 years. The Health Plan Employer Data and Information Set requires that participating health plans report the percentage of time that a clinical guideline—3 or more follow-up practitioner visits within 12 weeks of an initial antidepressant prescription for major depression—is met.[12] National HMO/POS plans currently show that patients follow their medication regimen, on average, only approximately 20% of the time.[13] That statistic is obviously not very good and may indicate that practitioners do not understand that patients with depression must be monitored carefully and frequently, especially if the depression is severe enough to warrant treatment with antidepressant medication. Hopefully, a benefit of the new concern about the safety of antidepressants will be increased vigilance and monitoring for all newly treated patients.

So basically, these studies have concluded something that many, many patients (and no doubt, psychiatrists) already knew: treating depression is damn serious business.

I worry now, as I did two months ago, that all this new public anxiety about antidepressants will not result in better care for those who are suffering from the disease. What it does seem to be resulting in is an increase in stigma for those who take the drugs. Recently I wrote a second (also unpublished) letter to NYT, in response to a December 14th op-ed:
entitled "This is Your Country on Drugs", in which being on antidepressants is compared with taking steroids:

Unless and until you have experienced the unbearable suffering of severe depression, please do not equate antidepressants with sports-performance-enhancing steroids. As my psychiatrist said to me a couple of weeks ago, as she added another med to my mix, "look, a hundred years ago there wouldn't have been anything more I could do for you." Yes, I also get great psychotherapy, and try to practice good self-care and have a good social support network, but a hundred years ago I would have been in the same position a diabetic was: likely to die young after horrible suffering.

I know a lot of people are probably on antidepressants because they complained vaguely to their GP, who threw some Zoloft samples at them to get them to go away. Maybe they don't even know why they're on them, or if, as the new UK practice guidelines suggest, they'd feel better if they just exercised a little more. But I'm not one of them. I take antidepressants because otherwise I couldn't live, and I resent being lumped together with people who take steroids so they can play a better ballgame.

I have many concerns about the drugs that I take. I am not about to mount a vigorous defense of pharmaceutical companies. I think there are legitimate questions to be asked about how to deal with the increasing number of diagnoses of depression, in both adults and children -- what social factors contribute to the problem? What can be done about it? Is it over-diagnosed? Is it under-diagnosed? How can we possibly pay for decent, compassionate care for those who suffer from depression?

I am not an epidemiologist or a public health expert, so I really don't know what the answers are. If the 'new' information about the safety problems associated with antidepressants results in genuine, and compassionate, research and debate about these issues, that will be good. So far, from where I sit, it has only fueled hysteria and served as a pretext to score points about the overmedication of the American public.

Me, I'll take overmedicated to dead, any day of the week.

Top 10 Posts I fully intend to write someday

1. Private Intellectuals: a Manifesto

2. A major depressive's take on the whole antidepressant controversy

3. Screw Kansas -- What's the matter with Brookline?

4. Revelations of a Colonoscopy: What is in George Bush's gut, anyway?

5. Light reading for doom-and-gloomers: a bibliography

6. Emigration: Not Just a Joke anymore

7. Why I can no longer make small talk (or: socializing is difficult when your response to "What books are you reading lately?" is "The Gulag Archipelago").

8. Why must Orcinus call it "pseudo-fascism"? Why not "neo-fascism"? Or "Bushism"?

9. Can Buffy help the Democrats? Who knows, but I have to work in the series somehow.

10. and, finally, a new, regular Biscuit feature: "What Would Kafka Do?"

I will be accepting votes via comments. You may vote as many times as you wish, as long as you have something interesting to say each time.

Biscuit Compendium Of Pessimism, #4

Quoted in Salon, one Sgt. Maj. J. David Gallant, retired MI, instructor at some military school or other: "Iraq is heading for civil war and total chaos and the Jan. 30 election is like putting a Flintstones Band-Aid on a gushing femoral artery."

"Want some wood?"

New Rules Issued for National Forests (washingtonpost.com): "The Bush administration issued comprehensive new rules yesterday for managing the national forests, jettisoning some environmental protections that date to Ronald Reagan's administration and putting in place the biggest change in forest-use policies in nearly three decades.

The regulations affect recreation, endangered-species protections and livestock grazing, among other things, on all 192 million acres of the country's 155 national forests. Sally Collins, associate chief of the U.S. Forest Service, said the changes will replace a bureaucratic planning process with a more corporate management approach that will allow officials to respond to changing ecological and social conditions.

The new rules give economic activity equal priority with preserving the ecological health of the forests in making management decisions and in potentially liberalizing caps on how much timber can be taken from a forest."

Choosing Sides

Tom Friedman quotes Tony Blair in his NYT column today:

"Whatever people's feelings or beliefs about the removal of Saddam Hussein and the wisdom of that, there surely is only one side to be on in what is now very clearly a battle between democracy and terror. On the one side you have people who desperately want to make the democratic process work, and want to have the same type of democratic freedoms other parts of the world enjoy, and on the other side people who are killing and intimidating and trying to destroy a better future for Iraq."

Friedman heartily agrees.

Me, I was not in favor of going to war when we did. I gave this administration the benefit of the doubt about WMD, I really did. I even gave them the benefit of the doubt about a possible Iraq-al Qaeda connection. I actually defended the administration to a friend once, saying we had no conclusive evidence that there WAS no connection, and the sober Colin Powell thought there was a really serious threat there. But I did not want to go to war.

It is not "siding with the terrorists" to point out that there are two groups of people involved that Mr. Blair does not mention: The first group is made up of people who are too busy being worried about getting blown up, rounded up, told to evacuate, told they are not allowed to evacuate, shot while trying to cross rivers, arrested in the middle of the night, beheaded, shot in the streets, starved, and just generally buffeted by a war they did not choose but that is being fought in their houses, streets, places of worship, and living rooms. The second group is the occupying army. To pretend the occupying army is acting simply as a neutral authority to help those Iraqis trying to establish the proverbial 'free and fair elections' is insulting: you don't have to believe that we went in there to make Dick Cheney's buddies rich and redeem the Bush family name from wimphood (as some might see it) to recognize that a country doesn't commit hundreds of thousands of troops somewhere if it does not have its own interest in the place. You can argue that the interest was an idealistic one -- spreading democracy and all that -- but that doesn't change the fact that the US, in Iraq, is not in it just for the Iraqis.

I agree that whatever went before, we do seem to be stuck in Iraq, although since no one really seems to believe we can win there, I'm not sure what the point of staying is. But this war has more than two sides. I look at it, and think about the great mass of people in the middle, who would most like the violence and disruption just to stop, and perhaps to sit down, quietly, for a meal with their loved ones, (think of this tomorrow and Saturday as you sit down to your holiday or non-holiday meal with YOUR loved ones...), and I think about which side I'm on, and it's clear: I'm on THEIR side.

The Problem With "Perceptions"

From New Donkey:

I think there's a growing consensus among Democrats today that (a) mobilization of partisans and ideologues is not enough; we need a persuasion strategy as well; (b) we're the out-party now, and no longer have any excuse for behaving as the Party of Government; (c) you just cannot win a presidential election without a clear, overarching message, defined as a theme or two that explain what you propose to do to organize public resources to address the needs and interests of the American people at home and abroad; and (d) that message must, for the foreseeable future, address the perceived weakness and incoherence of Democrats on national security issues; the perceived elitism and relativism of Democrats in terms of their understanding of the direction of American society and culture; and the perceived obsession of Democrats with a program-heavy, values-lite approach to economic and other domestic issues.

See, maybe I'm a pessimist (okay, yes, I'm definitely a pessimist, I took a test and everything, and it showed that only 14% of the population is more pessimistic than I am. It's a wonder I even bother to get up in the morning. Oh wait, it's not a wonder, it's the miracle of modern science.) -- anyway, getting back to the point, I keep reading about how there's this perception or that perception of Democrats, and we need to change the perception. So Dems are perceived to be weak, incoherent, elitist, relativistic, obsessive, and values-lite. Yeah, clearly that perception needs to change.

But it's my understanding that we simply do not have the propaganda machine in place to change it. Such a propaganda machine takes years to build; they have it, we don't. Have Dems sometimes left themselves open to one charge or another? Of course, in the same way that someone walking on the sidewalk has left themselves open to being run down by a Hummer that deliberately jumps the curb to hit them, Grand Theft Auto-style. Is there much that Dems can do about this? We don't have a Hummer. We can't get one quickly. Sure, we should start saving up for one, but whatever we do in the meantime shouldn't rely too much on changing how Dems are 'perceived'. Because honestly, I don't think we have a lot of control over that.

News-O-Matic

I've figured out how the NYTimes works now. Everyone should just ignore all articles except those called "News Analysis." The other articles are just press releases. The "News Analysis" is the, well, news, as long as you filter out all the rhetorical questions and hemming and hawing.

For example, today's brilliant "News Analysis" reads in part:

Mr. Bush faces fundamental questions about his strategy for bringing stability to Iraq. How can the United States - with the help of Iraqi security forces whose performance has been uneven at best - assure the safety of Iraqis who go to the polls on Jan. 30 when it cannot keep its own troops safe on their own base?

And are Mr. Bush and his defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, more vulnerable to criticism that they have failed to provide American forces with everything they need to take on a shadowy, fast-evolving enemy that, as the Tuesday attack showed, continues to display a notable degree of resilience?

Run this through the news-o-matic, and you get:

"Mr. Bush's strategy for bringing stability to Iraq has failed to keep even our own troops safe on their own base. Iraqi security forces are not much help, and yet Mr. Bush insists that elections will go ahead on January 30th as planned and that somehow, some way, it will be safe for Iraqis to vote. Mr. Bush and his defense secretary have failed to provide American forces with the tools they need to win the war, and as a result, as the Tuesday mess tent slaughter shows, they are in fact not winning the war."

At last, reality-based coverage of the war.

Senate Judiciary update... Senate Judiciary update...

From WaPo:

Senate Republican leaders yesterday appointed two of Congress's most outspoken antiabortion members to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is bracing for potentially bruising hearings on nominations to the Supreme Court.

Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and Sen.-elect Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) will join the panel's eight returning Republicans next month, assuming the Republican Conference follows tradition and approves the leadership's committee assignments for all 55 GOP senators. The breakdown of Judiciary will be 10 Republicans and eight Democrats.

For the memory-challenged, our dear friend Tom Coburn thinks that lesbians have made it unsafe for Oklahoma schoolchildren to use the restroom, and that people who perform abortions should be executed.

And Brownback? In 1999 he told a Kansas crowd that abortion was causing a social security crisis:

Sen. Sam Brownback says Social Security is in trouble in part because too many abortions mean too few workers available to pay into the system.

"A lot of people won't like this comment," the Kansas Republican said Friday to an audience of high school and college students at Butler County Community College. "You can see a real impact in the abortion policy we've had in this country. We have a lot fewer people out here. You can see we have a lot fewer workers coming on board."

The actual article is subscription-only, but there's a google cache of it here.

Jon Chait on academic liberalism

I've been meaning to link to this Jon Chait op-ed about 'liberal academia' for many days now. It's already been talked about a lot on the internets, so I don't have much to add, so I'll just fast-forward to the money quote: "[S]ome of the best-educated, most-informed people in the country overwhelmingly reject the GOP. Why is this seen as an indictment of academia, rather than as an indictment of the Republican Party?"

Poor Jonathan... Clearly still living in the deprecated reality-based community. You know, they're phasing out support for that standard entirely by 2006, I hear.

Bush avoided NAACP convention so as not to "demean the presidency", explains WAPO today.

Departing NAACP Leader Has 'Man-to-Man' Talk With Bush (washingtonpost.com): "In the past, Bush has said he refused to address the NAACP because of what he perceived as its unfair criticism of his policies, from his decision to invade Iraq to his opposition to many affirmative action programs. In yesterday's meeting, Bush said that he had refused to address the NAACP not because he feared a hostile reception from the group but because he thought such a reception would demean the presidency and embarrass the United States before the world, Mfume said. 'That was something that was in his gut,' Mfume said."

Read the whole article, it's mortifying. The IRS starts investigating the NAACP, and suddenly they too are talking about what's in Bush's gut. Could someone please give that man a high colonic?

In other words: the economy is great, if you're rich. Otherwise, not so much.

From the Washington Post:

Pay is rising more than twice as fast for the top fifth of wage earners as it is for all others, and the pace of gains at the high end is quickening, according to economists' analyses of government income data through September.

Meanwhile, the top 20 percent of households, ranked by income from all sources and earning $127,000 or more as of 2003, accounts for more than 40 percent of all consumer spending, according to Labor Department figures.

If the highest-paid workers continue to score ever-bigger salaries, bonuses and commissions, in other words, the economy should grow solidly even if the job market for other employees improves only very slowly for a while, according to economists who have studied the data, including some at the Federal Reserve. Fast wage growth at the top, the data indicate, has more than offset weaker gains at the bottom, so that total U.S. consumer purchasing power has risen strongly.

On Being A Neurotic, Pessimistic Alarmist...

By way of Thom Hartmann , a long quotation from the book that's next on my reading list, They Thought They Were Free, a study of just what those Jews who didn't leave Germany were actually thinking (well, the ones who survived, anyway...)

"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn't see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even to talk, alone; you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' Why not? - Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, everyone is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there will be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, 'It's not so bad' or 'You're seeing things' or 'You're an alarmist.'

"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don't know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. ...

"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty."

Go read Hartmann's whole essay.

And now, to sleep, perchance to dream...

Bill Moyers quotes Hitler, exposes Bush propaganda machine

From the transcript of his last PBS Broadcast of NOW: "As usual, we're not making this up. It's all on the record. And thanks to a front page story in the NEW YORK TIMES this week, we have also learned of a debate raging in the corridors of the Pentagon. Seems some folks there want to go even further in using lies and misinformation to manipulate public opinion abroad.

We have news for them. A former corporal in the German army learned how to do that first. In his gospel of MEIN KAMPF, the future fuehrer of Nazi Germany wrote that, 'The great masses of people…will more easily fall victim to a great lie than to a small one.'"

Read the whole transcript, for even more stuff to keep you awake at night.

Get your insomnia here!

Ten Things President Bush Doesn't Want You To Know About Scalia and Thomas -- Courtesy of the Center for American Progress (via Salon).

Bush has said Scalia is his favorite justice.

Today in Torture

Nothing New Under the Sun says

The ACLU's continuing release of documents relating to the FBI's battle with the administration over interrogation methods at Gitmo has culminated in the bombshell that FBI emails indicate this was signed off on by no lower an authority than President Bush himself. Despite his "shocked, shocked!" performance after the photos came out in spring. [Request for guidance regarding the OGC's EC regarding detainee abuse, referring to “interrogation techniques made lawful” by the “President's Executive Order.”]

There is not much joy in Mudville, however, because those on the Left who had such former faith in the goodness of the American people have been forced to realize that the American People doesn't give a damn about what happens to non-Americans, particularly brown ones, on the other side of the world, and especially those who have been designated The Enemy for so long, and if they can justify it by any rationalization whatsoever as being tolerable, they will, and have done.

This should be bigger than Watergate - torture is, as a dKos commenter put it, a lot worse than burglary - but most of us are pretty sure that it won't be.

After all, this is the godless, religion-hating ACLU that is bringing all this to the fore - jeopardizing our security - by insisting on rights guaranteed by the Freedom of Information Act! And besides, they were terrorists, and not Christians, and deserved it, and it will keep our children safe, and...

Resources

For the memory-challenged among us, I refer you to the original Abu Ghraib reportage and photographs.

ACLU resources on Torture

NYT has a complete guide with links to all the extant publicly available torture memos.

Biscuit Compendium Of Pessimism, #3

Digby says:

I think it's because liberals believe in our system so dearly that it's been very hard for us to wrap our minds around the idea that our government is seriously under threat from within. This is a very frightening proposition. You feel a little bit crazy for even thinking it. In this way, we are the victims of faith-based thinking, too. We just can't seem to accept what we are seeing before our very eyes. We think that our system is so strong that it can withstand anything.

Impeachment, stolen election, terrorist attack, trumped up war, media dominance all in less than a decade. It's happening.

Let's hear it for the August holidays!

Via Alternet, a truly brilliant proposal:

Once, led by organized labor and enlightened church leaders, American progressives were champions for more time. When thousands of women textile workers walked out of the mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts during the great strike of 1912, they carried signs that read: We Want Bread, and Roses Too.

Bread and roses, symbols of the two important sides of life: bread, the money to live, and roses, the time to enjoy life – higher wages and shorter hours. But somewhere along the line, we got "bread and butter" unionism focused solely on wages. The roses were left to wilt.

Yet Americans need roses now more than ever. They are telling us they're tired and want time to live. We should speak boldly, and in clear moral language, for their right to time, for their right to roses. We could live better as Americans by working less, and finding more time for the things that matter most – family, friends, community, and health – instead of being obsessed with material products and economic growth.

It's all a matter of values.

It's long been my contention that the best thing the government could do for families, for everyone, actually, is mandate more vacation time. It's something that companies simply will not do unless forced, that nearly all other industrialized nations have MUCH more of, and that the President himself takes plenty of. If the leader of the free world gets to loaf around in August, how come the rest of us can't?

A populace that is too busy to cook and eat properly, to spend time with one's family around a dinner table -- indeed, too busy to think -- is a populace that watches lots of TV, eats Hot Pockets, and thinks Saddam Hussein had something to do with September 11th.

[utterly unrelated, but brought to mind by Bread and Roses: Why in god's name did Whole Foods Market deprecate the Bread and Circus brand? It was a far, far better name for a grocery store than Whole Foods Market is. And does anyone know someone who used to shop at Bread and Circus and now actually calls the place they shop Whole Foods Market? B&C forever!]

"Our Leader", divinely ordained, with unlimited power in wartime

Connecting the Dots

1) Michael Isikoff at Newsweek reports on a 2001 memo to the White House Counsel's office:

Just two weeks after the September 11 attacks, a secret memo to White House counsel Alberto Gonzales’ office concluded that President Bush had the power to deploy military force “preemptively” against any terrorist groups or countries that supported them—regardless of whether they had any connection to the attacks on the World Trade Towers or the Pentagon.

The memo, written by Justice Department lawyer John Yoo, argues that there are effectively “no limits” on the president’s authority to wage war—a sweeping assertion of executive power that some constitutional scholars say goes considerably beyond any that had previously been articulated by the department.

Also, says the article, the memo concludes that the president may order "whatever military actions 'in his best judgment' he believes are necessary to protect the country. In the exercise of his power to use military force, 'the president’s decisions are for him alone and are unreviewable.'"

2) This is a few days old. Bush's speechwriter, who subsequently, according to Andrew Sullivan, had heart trouble requiring angioplasty, insists to the Washington Post that Bush's speeches are written carefully so as NOT to claim that he believes he was chosen by god. Most of the really disturbing things the president has said, like calling the WOT a "crusade", were "unscripted comments". When "closely questioned" on Bush's "frequently repeated line that 'freedom is not America's gift to the world, it's the almighty God's gift to all humanity,'" Gerson "said the president wrote those words. They are, he said, a repudiation of the kind of 'American exceptionalism' that holds that God has chosen the United States as his special instrument, and an echo of Abraham Lincoln's assertion that Americans should strive to be on God's side rather than claiming that God is on their side."

Really? Repudiating American Exceptionalism? Cause that's not what it sounds like to me. For example, here are some quotes from his 2004 state of the Union speech:

America is a nation with a mission, and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs. We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire. Our aim is a democratic peace -- a peace founded upon the dignity and rights of every man and woman. America acts in this cause with friends and allies at our side, yet we understand our special calling: This great republic will lead the cause of freedom.

[...]

My fellow citizens, we now move forward, with confidence and faith. Our nation is strong and steadfast. The cause we serve is right, because it is the cause of all mankind. The momentum of freedom in our world is unmistakable -- and it is not carried forward by our power alone. We can trust in that greater power who guides the unfolding of the years. And in all that is to come, we can know that His purposes are just and true.

May God continue to bless America.

That sounds a lot like saying that America is special and that God has blessed the country and that the mission that GWB has taken us on is supported by "that greater power who guides".

[Side note: While researching this post I found The Presidential Prayer Team. The internets never fail to suprise and entertain.}

3)Also old news, but "Our Leader" billboards are fer real.

"It's beginning to look a lot like fascist, everywhere you go..." (can't get freakin' christmas carols out of head!)

UPDATE: Screwed up the Our Leader link. Now fixed.

America: acting like arrogant empire? No, of course not.

From the Denver Post:

U.S. counterterrorism officials have set up a high-seas gantlet deploying Coast Guard cutters off Latin America and arresting foreign nationals trying to leave their own countries.

Coast Guard crews have blocked at least 37 Ecuadoran boats and detained more than 4,575 suspected illegal migrants over the past four years, records show. Then, over the past two years, they've sunk a dozen emptied migrant boats they deemed 'unseaworthy' - setting them ablaze and firing on them with their .50-caliber guns.

The crackdown fits into a new worldwide strategy that U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials describe as 'pushing our borders out.' Enforcing U.S. laws abroad is crucial, they contend, to control record illegal immigration, estimated at 500,000 a year, and close security gaps terrorists could exploit.

I didn't find this one myself, but I can't remember which other blogger pointed it out. If I find the link, I'll post the traditional Thanks to So-and-So.

Sullivan on Kinsley on bloggers

here:

Yep. You guys are the real stars of the blogosphere - the interlocutors and readers and writers who were once consigned to relative silence, but now have a medium all your own. The bloggers are conduits, forums, niches, designed to unleash the broader wisdom of the online crowds. That's one reason a Hayek-Oakeshott Tory like me loves the blogosphere so much. Not so much spontaneous order as the endless pursuit of a million intimations - a constant conversation, with peaks and lulls, discourtesies and jokes, outbursts and rants, meditations and quips, and all going nowhere in particular. And in the end, some truths do emerge, if you have the balls to acknowledge them. It's the purest form of democratic discussion yet devised. It's a big fucking deal. But if you're reading this, you probably know that.

Delusional Safire is, thankfully, retiring

Safire's piece in the NYT today lays out a Philip Roth Plot Against America-style scenario (damn good book, btw) where Bush doesn't attack Iraq, Saddam becomes a powerful regional dictator, and the Western world is screwed. It's pretty demented. I'm glad the old coot is leaving his crappy political column and sticking to his much better weekly articles on etymology.

Here's a locally stored link to a copy of the article for when the Times turns it into a pay article.

Abortion, again

Boston Globe has article on Democrats eyeing 'softer image on abortion'

Offering a warmer welcome for antiabortion voices would give Democrats a chance at bringing back voters who might agree with the party on economic and foreign policy issues, but balk at what they perceive is an uncompromising stance on abortion, Democrats said. Republicans, they note, finessed the matter so that the party retained its staunch antiabortion platform, but paraded Republican supporters of abortion rights such as California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani at the GOP convention this summer.

So is this about image, or about reality? Is it that Dems should follow the Republican descent into deceptive marketing of their platform? Or that Dems should, in fact, 'modulate' the position itself? It's my impression that lots of generally pro-choice voters voted for Bush because they thought abortion rights were not actually in danger ("Oh no, they wouldn't really make abortion illegal"). Oh yes, they totally would do that! But people who voted for Bush precisely because he supports a so-called 'culture of life' will not be persuaded to vote for a Dem with anything less than an entirely anti-abortion position.

What much of the debate among dems seems to be about, basically, is telling militant young women to stuff a sock in it, because when they chant "Abortion on demand, without apology," they hurt the Party. As far as I'm concerned, the Party is plenty modulated about abortion already, and telling militant young women to shut the hell up is not going to shut them up, it's just going to make them feel more threatened, and chant louder.

It deeply disturbs me that Dems are suddenly arguing about whether framing the abortion issue as "a woman's right to control her own body" is productive. For example, one of Left2Right's authors, in an extended post (followed by interminable comments) on why we should abandon Roe v. Wade:

Let me start with a woman's right to control her reproduction and her body, which is often abbreviated as the "right to choose".  In my view, this slogan has done great damage to liberals' credibility.  Opponents claim that abortion is murder, and if tacitly granted that claim, they cannot then be refuted on the grounds of a woman's right to choose murder.  The equation of abortion with murder has to be refuted first, before a woman's right to choose can be invoked.  To invoke it without having addressed the equation with murder is to appear either deaf or morally obtuse.  And that's how liberalism gets a bad name.

This is ridiculous. Even if abortion is murder, there are plenty of instances in which the state legally allows murder, so there's nothing morally obtuse about insisting that abortion should remain one of them. In fact, I'm perfectly happy saying that